“What’s wrong with you? Get up and do something!” I shouted at him. He sat shaking his head, “This is between a father and a son and there’s not a thing anybody … ”
He was drunk and cowardly and I could see in his eyes he was lying and afraid to intervene.
I yelled, “You know this is wrong! You aren’t doing anything!”
My dad busted out of the porch, smacking the screen door so hard it slapped against the back wall and stomped toward the house yelling my mother’s name, “Ingrid! Ingrid, goddammit let’s go! Let’s get out of this shit hole! These people are all going nowhere! My son can stay here and fucking rot for all I care! Get in the car!” I went straight to my room when we got home and I locked my door and got into bed and tried to sleep, but all night I wondered if Preston was okay.
Preston didn’t leave his room much the rest of that semester. He yelled at anyone who tried to talk to him. Mom would make me knock on his door to get him out of bed for school. If by chance his door was unlocked and I poked my head in to wake him up, he would grab one of the many books lying about in his covers and whip it as hard as he could at me. If I was lucky I’d close the door before it hit me. If I saw him coming out of our shared bathroom I was struck by his drastic change in appearance. His face had broken out into bright-red acne. Both cheeks were covered in a rash that seemed to be multiplying by the day. He looked much thinner and terribly sad. Our dad took it upon himself more than once to berate Preston for not washing his face enough. I knew that wasn’t the problem because Preston took a shower every time he went out and he had different skin products on the counter that he seemed to be constantly applying. One night my dad came home with some horrible loofah thing, brought my brother into our bathroom and with the door open, and as my mother and I stood there horrified, he “taught his son how to scrub this disgusting fungus off his face.” The blood ran down Preston’s neck as our dad held him with one hand by the neck and brutally scrubbed his sores with the other. That night I threw my body in the middle of the scene and started screaming for Dad to stop but he knocked me aside so I turned to our mother who put her hands over her face and went into her room and closed the door.
Preston started reading philosophy books and studying French and German saying he wanted to read the philosophers in their original texts. Our dad had been a philosophy major in college and used to talk philosophy and literature with Preston. I was not involved in these conversations even as they swirled around me. Sometimes if the family sat down together for dinner, usually on a weekend night, our dad would open a bottle of red wine, which often turned into a second bottle, and then he’d talk about authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and philosophers like Sartre and Nietzsche. Every once in a while, I would recognize the subject matter as something I had studied in school and would try to join in. Our mother never tried to participate, she just cooked and served dinner and did the dishes. But I wanted to engage in the intellectual discussions. So I would try to add something I felt had been overlooked like a fact about an author’s life that I had maybe studied for a class report.
My father would invariably turn his scrutiny on me and with great sarcasm and amused displeasure, say something like, “Are you part of this? Are you talking? Did anyone address you?”
To which I would gamely answer, “No Dad, but I just thought you guys should know that … ”
He would cut me off with something like, “Have you read the works of Aristotle? Plato? No, I didn’t think so. Did you read the Wall Street Journal this morning? Did you read Barron’s? The New York Times? Do you have any idea what’s happening in the world? No. How old are you now, ten?”
“I’m thirteen, Dad.”
“Thirteen. Thirteen years old. I’m sorry, but thirteen does not deserve an audience. Let me know when you grow up. Thirteen doesn’t cut it.”
Preston got involved with a very unusual girl around this time. They were in the same advanced philosophy class at the high school. She had dark eyes with dark circles around them and long wavy black hair that she said her parents said would never be cut. Her family was Jewish, of a very liberal mindset, very Bohemian and intellectual. The girl played the flute, as did I, so I talked to her about that whenever I saw her, but she was much more keenly devoted to the flute and had a more fitting demeanor for a flute player than I thought I did, so I always deferred to her in conversation. She was four years older than me, but beyond our age difference, she seemed to be from an entirely different time. Her clothes were handmade and exotic. She sometimes had stars painted on her face. The girlfriend’s family allegedly grew marijuana in their yard and had live chickens—both daring acts in our community at that time.
One Saturday night my brother and the girl showed up very late at our house. Awoken by the sounds of arguing, I came down the carpeted steps so I could see what was happening. There stood my brother with black stars on one cheek, wearing a long caftan of rough woven cloth.
Our mother was looking at Dad, “This is terrible, he can’t walk around like this. They’re on some kind of drugs. I’m telling you they’re on something!”
“Mom, these caftans are very common for the men to wear in Morocco.”
“You aren’t in Morocco. Preston what has happened to you? Are you taking drugs with this girl?”
Dad was saying, “Get upstairs and take that ridiculous thing off and scrub that shit off your face. And you need to go home to your parents, little girl, and let them see who their daughter is.”
Preston was swaying, his eyes red and squinting, but he got a sudden burst of clarity and announced, “No. She’s not leaving. She’s staying with me.”
With that our parents let out a simultaneous roar, “What?! No she is not.”
My dad started scuffling with the two of them, grabbing the girl by the arm saying, “You are getting out of my house! You will never set foot in this house again!”
The girl screamed, “Preston! He’s hurting me!”
My brother grabbed Dad’s arm, “Dad, come on, she’s okay. Come on Dad take it easy.”
The girl escaped out the front door and was on the porch and Dad was yelling at Preston, “Look at you. You look like a clown. You look like a loser. You want to be with this girl so bad? This filthy slut of a girl? Are you fucking this? You are, aren’t you! You’re only sixteen years old! You want this? Then you aren’t my son! I don’t want you here! Get out! Go over and fuck at her parents’ house and see what they think of you two idiots! Get out and don’t come back!”
“Dad, please, you don’t understand. Dad!”
Preston went out onto the front porch and I heard him let out a sob. But I also heard the girl saying, “Preston, come on, let’s go. Fuck them. Come on, Preston.”
Preston did a surprising thing then. He left that night with her and didn’t come back. He lived with the girl at her parents’ house, for the rest of his junior year. I never saw him. He never came to the house. He came in to get things from his room maybe once or twice early on, but after that, I never saw him.
The next thing I heard was that he would be graduating from high school a year early. Then I heard he was coming back to our house to get ready to leave for Europe. I can only guess at all of this. I know he broke up with the girl but not because he didn’t love her—he told me he did. Much later, he told me that the mother let him get eggs from the chicken coop and he made himself fresh eggs and it was the best breakfast in the world. Also, I remember him saying that the parents were very kind to each other and to their daughter, and to him as well. He made it sound like it was a very foreign thing for people to be so kind and contented. I thought it sounded so different from our home life that I could barely imagine it. He might have stayed there forever, but there must have been a pull to get out on his own. Preston wanted to know the world. He loved languages and was reading more material in French. The girl spoke to Preston in French. He seemed to have a strong desire for a larger world experience.
Preston somehow ma
de amends with our father. I don’t think our mother was ever really mad at him, she was always just sad and upset and hurt and confused and wrapped up in her own emotions. Dad paid for a plane ticket to Europe—one way—for his son as a graduation present. Our mom was against the whole thing. She said my dad was pumping crazy romantic ideas into Preston’s head about Europe and about traveling and being a writer like Ernest Hemingway. Nobody listened to her.
Before he left, Preston was only home for a short time. His skin was smooth again with a few red scars. He was very thin now, not all pumped up from lifting weights and drinking protein shakes for football. He had a cool new bohemian sense of style. He had an incredible pair of Levi’s blue jeans that were pale blue from years of wear. You couldn’t buy jeans that were that perfectly faded like a summer sky. His girlfriend’s mom sewed patches on the jeans because she knew how much Preston liked them. The effect of all the torn holes and threads and patches was a true work of art.
He knew how much I liked them; one day before he left for Europe he came into my bedroom with them, “Hey little sis, little Sid the sis, you want these don’t you?”
“What? Yeah! I love those!”
“Well guess what, your old brother is gonna give them to you as a little token of his affection.”
He came over and kissed me on the forehead, which I don’t know if anyone had ever done in my whole life.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around. I bet it’s been pretty hard on you having to deal with them on your own.”
“Well, they mostly just ignore me.”
“I know. I see that now. I’m sorry you’ve had it so shitty. You don’t deserve this. You’re smart and you’re pretty and you’re a really good person.”
I started to feel like I was going to cry so I just said, “No I’m not. Shut up. Give me the pants and get out of my room.”
Preston started laughing, “That’s my kid sister! Tough as nails! That’s gonna see you through, kid. You’re gonna be okay, I know it. Well, let me know if they fit. I’ll be leaving tomorrow and you and Brandy are the only ones I’ll miss. Actually, the weird thing is, I’m gonna miss those lousy parents of ours too.”
The jeans fit me great, and my big brother left the next day. He was in Europe for many months, almost a year. He sent a few postcards, addressed to our whole family. He called collect once from London when his wallet was stolen and spoke only with our father who wired him the money to proceed and helped him get new identification papers. Otherwise all we knew was that he had found work clearing rocks for a vineyard at the base of the Pyrenees Mountains near Nice in France. He lived in a hut with an old man who had spent his life working on the vineyard as a laborer, clearing new land, planting and caring for new vines. Preston later told us that the old man read philosophy and literature at night. The old man drank red wine every night and so did Preston. If Preston’s pronunciation was not right, the old man would throw something at Preston’s head, a book or the leather cap the man wore. Preston said it was the best studies he ever had. He learned wines, he learned the French language, the great French writers Zola, Proust, Genet, Sartre.
Our mother became very ill with pneumonia during his absence. Much was said about it being a bad case of double pneumonia in both lungs, and a surgeon pronounced that one lung should be partially removed. I heard all of this in roundabout ways, never directed toward me, snippets of phone conversations and discussions between my parents. My mother was thinner than ever, very weak and wrapped up in her illness. I started scrounging around for food because she wasn’t making dinners any more. Somehow a plan was made that instead of undergoing lung surgery, my mother would travel to Florida to convalesce at the winter home of an older couple who were my grandparents’ friends.
My father went shopping at Bonwit Teller’s downtown and came home with a vacation wardrobe for my mother. There was a white pants suit and a wraparound, designer one-piece bathing suit, and a few other matching pieces.
My father drove her to O’Hare airport one Saturday morning and she was gone. While my mother was in Florida, my great-aunt Evelyn, my mother’s only living relative, came to stay with my father and me. She had scoliosis and was always in pain. She lived alone and had never married or had children. I knew that Aunt Evelyn loved Preston very much, and she thought my parents should not have sent him off alone to Europe when he was only seventeen. She talked about him a lot. That was fine with me. I missed him and I wondered about him too. When I was little she liked me a lot and brought me wonderful little dolls and wonderful treats from the bakery near her house. But when she came to stay this time she didn’t like me at all. I was thirteen and she couldn’t relate to anything about me. She hated that I insisted on wearing the jeans and moccasins I had from our northern Minnesota summers all year round, and especially to school. She hated that I did my homework in my room with my door closed, but it was a habit I didn’t want to change. She didn’t like to cook and I didn’t know how to cook, so we didn’t eat well at all. She was always tired and angry because of her scoliosis, but also because she had some crazy ideas that kept her up at night. She would call me down at two in the morning, on a school night, to hysterically say that the refrigerator was about to blow up and that she didn’t want to wake my dad but that I should take a look at it.
The first time this happened, I stood in the kitchen with her, both of us in long nightgowns and slippers, she with a lovely quilted robe my mother had given her for Christmas the year before. We stood facing the fridge, waiting for the noise she said indicated that the blowup was imminent.
Then it happened and she said, “There, what’s that?! You see? Something’s wrong with it! We shouldn’t be standing this close to it!”
But I said, “Aunt Evie, it’s the ice maker. That’s how the ice maker always sounds.”
“No, it can’t be that. Don’t tell me it’s just that. This is serious and you haven’t even looked into it. You won’t even open the door and check to see what’s really happening. Nothing that’s working properly makes a noise like that.”
The new refrigerator always made that noise. I was sure it was nothing but that. “Aunt Evie, I’m sorry, but I have school tomorrow and I’m going back to bed.”
“What? You’re going to leave me alone with this? Do you want me to wake up your father?”
“No. I think you should go back upstairs and go to bed.”
I turned my back on her and climbed the stairs to my room. Aunt Evie had Preston’s room in his absence, and I wanted her to go back and shut her door and go to sleep. That’s how a person survived in this house, not by getting all worked up about everything. But instead of going back to Preston’s room, she tapped on my locked door, and whispered for me to come out and check the refrigerator again. I ignored her and tried to squelch the anger that was welling up inside me. I wanted to scream at her. I wanted people to stop knocking on my bedroom door. I wanted them to stop picking my feeble little lock with a hairpin. I wanted them to leave me alone.
The next morning, I came down dressed for school, very tired and not in a happy mood. There was Aunt Evie, sleeping at the kitchen table, across from the refrigerator, situated so she was facing it, and under her head and folded arms on the table was the huge Chicago city phone book turned to the emergency fire department page.
I prayed every night that my mother would come home. When she finally returned she was listless and self-pitying. Her beauty and air of sophistication were enhanced by her exaggerated weight loss and I was struck by what an exotic creature she had become. When she arrived from Florida, my father picked her up at the airport and brought her home. I was in the kitchen when she walked in. My father was all worried, “Sidney? Sidney, here, help your mother. Ingrid, would you like to sit down? Sidney, help your mother pull out a chair.”
Pull out a chair? I thought she was supposed to be better. She was wearing her white turban with her shiny auburn hair tucked behind her ears and hanging straight to her collarbone. I had
never seen anyone wear a turban before. It was by Halston, made of a heavy stretch fabric and pulled on like a cap. The turban complemented the white pantsuit and the bathing suit my dad had bought her. Suntanned, she had perfectly painted toes and was wearing light-tan suede sandals, and her gold coin necklace. She wore no shirt under the white jacket, and it fell perfectly against her impossibly thin body. I looked at her in wonder. I really didn’t know that people could look so exotically perfect. After a long while, she noticed me looking at her and, now sitting in a kitchen chair, looking like she did not belong there at all, stretched out a thin tanned hand and said, “Come here Sidney dear and give your mother a kiss.”
I didn’t—and did—want to. I approached her slowly and tried to hug her but she didn’t let me, she just turned her cheek toward me and closed her eyes. I kissed her cheek and went up to my room.
Aunt Evie stayed another day or two, helping my mother get acclimated. One afternoon she told my mother that the big brick house on the corner was housing some kind of nighttime drug-trafficking operation. I knew the house was owned by a prominent doctor and his family.
When I shared this with Aunt Evie, she turned to my mother and said, “You see? Just as I suspected. That’s how they’re getting the drugs.”
“Aunt Evie, cars go in and out at night because the doctor is on call. It’s just one car and it doesn’t go in and out constantly. My room faces their house. Nothing weird is going on over there.”
Aunt Evie turned to my mother, “You see what I mean about her? This is how she talked to me the entire time you were gone.”
“Mom, Aunt Evie woke me up in the middle of the night a million times telling me the refrigerator was blowing up. I told her it was the ice maker.”
“She wouldn’t even answer her door when I knocked. She has no respect for anyone. She doesn’t listen to anyone.”
“How am I supposed to have respect for a bunch of crazy talk about stuff that isn’t happening? Forget it! If it isn’t real somebody gets to say so!”
A Girl Called Sidney Page 5